CHAPTER 4

Magic Bus Trip

The great morning which is for all

appears in the East.

Let its light reveal us to each other

who walk on the same path

of pilgrimage.

—Rabindranath Tagore

The Americans are coming! The Americans are coming!” Wavy loved running through the narrow lanes of Canterbury playing Paul Revere in reverse, announcing the arrival of the Medicine Ball Caravan. We were getting ready to put on our last concert, with Pink Floyd and Rod Stewart. One bus was now festooned with signs, “Free John Sinclair,” who had been jailed in Michigan for possession of two joints of marijuana. By the measuring stick of two marijuana joints, nearly every one of the thousand Brits who attended the concert on August 31, 1970, would also have been jailed. However, the Brits preferred their cannabis in the form of hash combined with tobacco, and so both the smokes and the music were decidedly English.

The hippies on the other side of the pond were no less prone to the usual concert accidents, and I spent most of the day in the emergency area of the Rock Doc tent, sewing up minor wounds and caring for those who had imbibed too much of one or another substance. With or without herbal support, it was a great concert and a wonderful end to what would turn out to be, after editing, a really awful movie. Elaine and I packed up our gear and said some long goodbyes to the musicians, cameramen, groupies, roadies, assistant directors, producers, stage crews, and bus crews who had formed the accidental community of making this Warner Bros. movie. Elaine and I took a train to London and stayed in a hotel for a couple of romantic nights. It was the first time we had been really alone in months.

We planned to meet up with the Hog Farm crew to say goodbye. Wavy decided he wanted to drive on to India or Nepal. He persuaded Stoneground, the house band from the caravan, to do a benefit concert to raise money for the Hog Farm to buy a new bus to get the group through Europe and Eurasia, over the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan, and then inside India. Reality was catching up with us. Elaine needed to get back to law school; she returned home to San Francisco after Canterbury. I agreed to stay to help out with the concert.

The concert was held at the Roundhouse and brought out the cream of British rock and roll; even Beatle George Harrison flittered about backstage. Most important, it was a sellout, raising more than $10,000—enough to buy a very old British Leyland transport, christened “the Sterling Hog,” that would be retrofitted into a mobile commune for a dozen or two to live on.

We decided to do a test run with the new bus in Arthurian and mythical England by celebrating the autumnal equinox at Stonehenge and Glastonbury. At Stonehenge, we camped in the middle of the monoliths, while Wavy performed Hopi and Huna ceremonies and chanted Om. There were no barricades then and we were completely alone. Then we took the bus the short distance to Glastonbury and climbed the Tor, an ancient druid religious site on top of which was built the Church of St. Michael, where the Holy Grail is supposed to be buried. We drank electric Kool-Aid and nettle tea in honor of Tibet’s greatest cave saint, Milarepa, who, Wavy told us, lived on nettles while in meditation. Tripping on acid, the vision of the postmodern Hog Farmers joining hands with some ancient druid practitioners celebrating the equinox made me feel as if I had joined an eternal circle. I felt like I was amidst the Children of Light and would find my Knight’s errant that would help hold off darkness. It was a very vivid experience. After it, I knew that I wanted to stay with the buses, join the Hog Farm, and go to the Himalayas. First I would have to go back to San Francisco and convince Elaine to join us. I had trouble leaving this wonderful communal family, but I had promised Elaine, so I stayed only long enough to drive with them to Paris and Amsterdam, where, in the back of the bus, I helped one of the Hog Farmers deliver her baby.

The Hippie Caravan

I returned to Elaine in our apartment on Turk Street. She had been there only a couple of weeks but had started law school as planned. We agreed to put off the conversation about rejoining the Hog Farm buses in Europe until after I had my surgery and she had a taste of what law school was like. While she was going to classes and I awaited my date with Dr. Richards’s magical scalpel, I worked as an emergency room doctor to raise enough money to start paying off our debts. Presbyterian Hospital was kind to me and waived the costs for my surgery, even though I was no longer in the internship program. Dr. Richards also refused to charge for his fee, citing “professional courtesy.” It was thrilling to think that someone as respected as he would consider me a colleague.

The surgery to remove my parathyroid glands went well. I suspect my body, like others Dr. Richards had operated on, cooperated with his deft hands. And best of all, the biopsy taken during surgery looked like an adenoma, not a malignant adenocarcinoma. The specimen was sent off to a specialty lab for confirmation.

I did turn yellow right after surgery—they never found out the cause of the jaundice but I suspect it was from the inhaled anesthesia. Whatever the cause, it extended my recovery. Wavy and Bonnie Jean also returned to the States and stayed at our apartment on Turk Street while I was recuperating, just long enough to convince Elaine that we should rejoin the Hog Farm. Wavy’s idea for the “Journey to the East,” as he called it after Hermann Hesse’s book by that name, consisted of two parts. The first was to “Visit every Christian shrine, Jewish synagogue, Muslim mosque, Hindu temple, Buddhist vihara on our drive between Europe and Asia.” The second part of the journey was to “Raise money, bring medicine and food to the people in India and East Pakistan who are starving and sick.” Elaine was putty in his hands. No self-respecting hippie could resist an offer to join this loving commune on a magical trip like that.

The kicker came in early November: a historic cyclone hit Bhola Island, the largest of the East Pakistani (now Bangladeshi) islands at the mouth of a river that emptied into the Bay of Bengal. Early reports were that a half million mostly poor, rural people had perished when the storm laid waste to Bhola and western India. With the United Nations and other international relief organizations slow to get aid to the victims in the months following the tragedy, Wavy came up with the idea of delivering aid ourselves. It was easy enough for me to go to hospitals in San Francisco and get medical supplies donated. If a bunch of hippies could provide food for cyclone victims, Wavy figured, the United Nations and other relief organizations would be shamed into taking a more active role in feeding and caring for the displaced. Warner Bros. had thrown in some extra tickets and supplies for the continuation of the trip. Somehow an Éclair 16 movie camera from the caravan and a cameraman materialized and joined us to document the hippie relief effort.

The transformation for me and Elaine from radical doctor and law student to hippies-in-a-commune was complete. I wouldn’t be looking for a residency when I recovered from surgery, and Elaine was going to be doing her law school reading overseas.

During the time I was recuperating, members of the counterculture royalty came by our Turk Street apartment to wish Wavy and Bonnie Jean bon voyage and to offer help in raising money for “Earth People’s Stomach,” the campaign to take food and medicine to Bhola Island. Hog Farm commune members from Woodstock, or the farm in New Mexico, or from earlier bus trips came by. Elaine organized her law school courses and books. The apartment was filled with interesting conversations and high spirits. It was a nice way to spend post-op time.

One night Ken Kesey, the original Prankster, author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and captain of the Merry Pranksters bus Further came over. Kesey was larger than life. He had been a champion wrestler in high school and college, nearly making the U.S. Olympic team. He had the bearing of a jock, the heart of a mystic, and the timing of a street magician. As a creative writing student at Stanford, he had been an accidental early user of LSD when he volunteered to be an experimental subject for seventy-five dollars per day in what he later found out was a CIA-financed study of psychedelic drugs. Legend has it that the military wondered whether the drug that was opening the minds of young people in Haight-Ashbury and around the country might make soldiers more pliable, perhaps even compliant. No one, least of all Kesey, could have imagined what would come after one dose of Ken Kesey was mixed with several government-sanctioned doses of LSD: it gave birth to the Merry Pranksters, hippies, the Hog Farm, and the counterculture. And to many who came later, Kesey was our culture’s pied piper.

Amidst bearded, beaded, slumping hippies, Kesey was clean-shaven and athletic with an almost military bearing, a broad open face, and an easy, deceptive smile. His body looked powerful, like that of a fireman or policeman or ex–special forces, but his eyes were wise and mischievous. If there had been an opera of the gods and goddesses of the increasingly pantheistic 1960s, Kesey might have played the role of the Norse god Loki or the Native American trickster Coyote. Each time I met him I was struck by how he so quickly snapped from the “fade-into-the-crowd everyman” to riveting his piercing blue eyes on you, prizing open a higher, deeper person inside the looker and lookee alike.

Paul Krassner, editor of the underground magazine The Realist, was there, as was David Crosby, who had been living on a houseboat in nearby Sausalito. Paul and Laura Foster and others from the Merry Pranksters joined us too. I lost track of all the people who rang the doorbell. Lots of buds were lit and beer appeared. I brought up a nitrous tank that I had left over from the Medicine Ball Caravan. When blow-up pillows and clear plastic breathing tubes materialized, the nitrous dispensing began.

The phone rang and Kesey answered. It was columnist Herb Caen asking, “Is there a Brilliant person there?” Kesey responded, like it was scripted, “You want a Brilliant person? You are speaking to him,” and thus flowed enough material to fill many columns for weeks.

An impromptu string band started up in our living room. Kesey spied the nitrous tank. “My favorite fruit drink!” he proclaimed and wrested control from me. He doled out the nitrous, checked the tubes and blew up the pillows, telling outrageous stories and making sure everyone had a safe and soft landing. He gave a pillow to Wavy, but when I approached him for one—a little in awe, for Kesey was a bit of a messianic figure—Kesey hesitated, even seemed to refuse. He tilted his head, his eyes drilling into my soul as if seeing me, judging me, with the eyes of God. “What makes you think you are . . . worthy?” he asked.

A confusion of feelings about joining the Hog Farm, leaving America to run away with the mystical circus, being doctor to the pilgrims danced around my head, and I did not feel worthy. Not in the way I felt Kesey was asking.

“Cheer up, Larry. You are worthy. We all are,” Wavy intervened, his eye lasers locking with Kesey’s. “Ken! Don’t play with him so rough! He’s new.”

Everyone laughed. It was only laughing gas, right? Nothing mystical or magic here, nothing profoundly spiritual. It wasn’t as if there were some kind of deep magic. Was there? As with Wavy, you had to always be on guard with Kesey, lest a magical moment break out.

During that wonderful evening with Kesey and Wavy at our apartment on Turk Street, I caught one of the guests in my office, rummaging through my little black doctor’s bag, tossing aside antibiotics and bandages, looking for narcotics. I stopped him, but I could never again be so casual with my little black bag. I decided then and there never to be in a position to prescribe narcotics, and though I’ve kept my medical license active for forty years, I have never had a narcotics license nor prescribed them.

Wavy and Bonnie Jean flew to Europe to join the caravan a few days later while Elaine and I stayed behind to finish packing. Elaine’s law books filled more than one suitcase. “Get well quickly and come have Thanksgiving turkey in Turkey,” Wavy said. The follow-up tests on my tumor were reassuring. I was warned that I might have some residual effects as my body adjusted to the absence of parathyroid hormone. From time to time I did need help walking; my legs took months to figure out how to work again after surgery.

Elaine and I flew from San Francisco through Germany and met with the Hog Farm in Istanbul, where they had set up tie-dyed teepees in a gypsy-like campsite right on the Bosporus Strait. I brought a new Whole Earth flag from Stewart Brand, who had, some say, inspired NASA to release the photo of the entire Earth because of his nonstop badgering. Stewart felt sure that when people of all religions, nationalities, ideologies, tribes, and races of the world saw our common home, a tiny island of blue and white and green against the black void of space, peace and harmony would descend overnight as everyone realized that we are all in this together. That was the flag we flew over our tie-dyed rainbow-colored teepees on the narrow strait that separates Europe and Asia, where East meets West, the perfect symbol for Westerners journeying to the East.

When Elaine and I joined up with the two buses, we were given sleeping space in the Sterling Hog in the next bunk over from the Gravys. I got a new name, “Doctor Larry,” as one of the two family doctors on board. Butch, our intense and beloved driver, was the “transportation commissioner.” Lou was the “money commissioner,” and Fred the Fed was the “police commissioner.” In addition to my medical responsibilities, I was made the “guru commissioner.” My job was to meet, interview, and report back on any of the Sufis and gurus, saints and sadhus, lamas and rabbis, preachers and mystics we met along the way to figure out whether they were legitimate or not. I barely knew what a guru was. My attraction to the counterculture had been strictly political, not at all spiritual. Because of my deep skepticism, I was either the best or the worst person for the job.

We drove the buses from Istanbul to Ankara and to the old Roman town of Trabzon on the Black Sea. Driving through a torrential rain, one of our buses broke an axel and a water pump, leaving us stranded in Turkey for two months while we waited for parts to arrive from Germany. We learned to say “Our water pump is broken” in Turkish, and every time we did, we were stunned by the hospitality offered to a bunch of poor hippies in a broken bus. We put the bus up on blocks near the shore, and during a terrible storm, when the tide threatened to wash the bus away, Wavy stood on the roof with a trident daring the storm to do its worst.

Because Warner Bros. had paid us in plane tickets back to the States from Delhi, we had to make it to India and get back to America before the tickets expired at the end of the year. We thought a year was plenty of time to go from London to Turkey to India, but we hadn’t planned on being stranded thousands of miles away from the nearest American Express office, where most of us had money waiting for us. But instead of panicking, we explored. We visited nearby villages, went out to dinner, got friendly with locals. We were skinny and nearly malnourished but happy to be in Turkey together.

When the parts finally arrived and the bus was fixed, we headed to Tehran, where we found the only American Express office between Turkey and India. A quick look at the map helped us realize that we could, with a slight detour, make a pilgrimage to Mount Ararat, supposedly the site where Noah’s ark landed and he saw the first rainbow after the flood. We could honor our Abrahamic tradition and celebrate the birthplace of the ubiquitous hippie symbol in one trip.

But because it was a cloudy day, we couldn’t see the mountain as we approached it. All we could see were small houses and surrounding vegetation. A local family of Kurds invited us to tea in their backyard while we waited for the sun to appear. Within a few minutes, the sun came out, revealing a breathtaking panorama of green trees and snowcapped mountains, including Mount Ararat. The Kurds didn’t get why we were so excited, but they said they had never been visited by strangers like us—we might have been space aliens, given how odd we must have looked to them. They could not have been more kind.

Next, we drove through Iran. Under the shah, Iran was a suffocated police state. Omnipresent was the Savak, Iran’s secret police, intelligence service, and domestic security all wrapped up into one enterprise. Possession of hashish in Iran was a capital offense, so we double-cleaned the buses to make sure we had nothing. There had been public executions for smuggling or carrying drugs; even a young American had been executed. We stopped for one clandestine zikar ceremony performed by a half dozen whirling dervishes; their meditative dance brought us a sense of peace during the tense trip through the country. We picked up our badly needed travelers’ checks at the American Express office in Tehran and hightailed it to the Afghan border.

At the border, the Iranians had held up six or seven hippie buses. Some were large like ours, others minibuses or VWs with two or three kids following the same siren call to the East as we were. When it was our turn to cross Mashhad into Afghanistan, the first town was the old city of Herat. The legend is that Alexander the Great himself conquered this Zoroastrian town on his way to the Indus.

Two customs officers welcomed us, stepping jauntily into the bus. Their eyes grew big when they saw the hippie decals, rainbow-colored ceiling, and the twenty or so makeshift beds. “Where is your hashish?” they asked me. In addition to being guru commissioner, I was given a sideline of customs and immigration; as “Doctor Larry,” I could, when called upon, act as straight as an arrow.

“We don’t have any illicit drugs,” I insisted.

“Today we have many buses painted like yours. Every one so far had some hidden hashish they were bringing into Afghanistan,” they retorted. There were lots of young people traveling over land to find spiritual awakening in India and Nepal. The old Silk Road was becoming the new Hippie Trail. In front of me was a line of hippie buses that had already entered Afghanistan. Behind me was another line of buses waiting to enter on their way to India. They all looked just like us. Each was painted with wild colors and carried passengers dressed in tie-dye or leather. The pull of spiritual India was strong on my generation, though I can’t say we really understood what that meant.

“You need to tell us where your drugs are hidden. It will be harder for you if we find them on our own.”

“We have none, zero, truly.”

“Then why not?” the more senior officer pushed forward, challenging me.

“We are just coming from Iran. Carrying hashish is a capital offense there. Honestly, we may be hippies but we are not idiots. No, we do not have any hashish!”

“Oh, okay, okay. If this is true, you are unusual hippies.”

These stern, mustachioed, crusty and macho guards exchanged glances and giggled.

“Yes. If you have no hashish, you must become our guests. Come, we must give you some of ours! Come in for tea and smoke some with us!” They laughed, slapped me on the back, and nearly forty hippies followed. The Afghanis seemed to know us so well, and we knew them so little. In that respect, not much has changed.

Compared with Iran, Afghanistan felt like a burst of freedom, macho freedom certainly, but even though more women wore burkas in Afghanistan than in the shah’s modern Iran, more women in Kabul came up to our buses to find out who we were—boldly entering and taking off their headscarves. There was pixie dust in the air. In Herat, horse-drawn carriages adorned with tinkling bells carried passengers down the avenues, and the streetlights glowed like they had captured fireflies. We half expected Tinker Bell to pop out of a flower.

Just as Wavy had promised, we stopped to pray or meditate or just be silent at every place of worship—mosque, church, or temple—along our route, just as Hesse’s protagonist did in Journey to the East. Wavy Gravy was our poet laureate and spiritual elder, and Bonnie Jean was the heart of our commune. Wavy read aloud to us every night. In Afghanistan, he read Rumi and Kabir. Some of us visited the huge statues of Buddha, the ones that the Taliban has since destroyed. We were on the Silk Road, witnessing the lasting influence of Alexander the Great, the meeting of Western philosophy, Buddhism, and Hinduism. We watched more Sufi dancing and hung out with the malang, the free-spirited cousins to the Sufis, who dressed in rainbow-colored robes like Joseph’s from the Old Testament. The malang keep no material possessions, hold no doctrine, and follow no caste system. Some call them shamans, intoxicated by God. The malang still exist, although their numbers, never large, dwindled every year under the Taliban.

From Afghanistan, we drove over the Khyber Pass. Butch mastered steering our forty-foot-long bus into and out of the strangest places. To add to his legendary status, he decided to drive the Khyber Pass while yo-yoing out the bus window. We moved on to Pakistan, where we hoped to get visas to cross India and transit Calcutta to the newly named Bangladesh to get food and medicine to the cyclone victims and embarrass the relief agencies. But we were months late in our charitable endeavor, and our feeble efforts would not have embarrassed anyone. We arrived amidst a war of independence between Pakistan and Bangladesh. Pakistani officials didn’t want us to go through their country to India, but they let us in after we proved that we had no hashish or other drugs. This time, however, no one offered us a shared smoke.

We drove the buses to a spot near Islamabad and Rawalpindi, where a dozen horses had been rented for us to ride into the hills with a guide so that we could learn the history of the Kushan Empire along the way. The coins of the Kushans bear witness to a time in the second century C.E. when parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan were the most religiously inclusive and liberal spots on earth. One coin has an image of Buddha on it; many show the gods and goddesses of Persia, Egypt, India, Greece, and Rome. One is labeled “Adono,” which is said to honor Adonai, the God of the Israelites, as they understood from Jewish trade caravans that passed through. Some historians believe that the Kushans were just smart merchants, who cared little for which god was stamped on a coin, as long as the gold or silver was pure. Others believe that this was a great period of enlightenment and tolerance, and that anyone was free to worship any of those gods. This most tolerant multiculturalism existed almost two thousand years ago in a land between India and Persia that is today Pakistan and Afghanistan, dominated by the Taliban and religious intolerance. The coins imprinted with dozens of gods and goddesses from a half dozen faiths remain in museums around the world, testimony to what was once a welcome to practitioners of every kind. Whether their motives were fiscal or spiritual, it gives me hope that such a place ever existed and may yet again.

Our first stop in India was the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar. Sikhism is a new religion, by Indian standards, founded in Punjab by Guru Nanak in the late fifteenth century. Amritsar is their Rome or Jerusalem; we had blundered into their holy of holies, dropping in one day in the middle of rituals like aliens from the sky. Yet the Sikhs adopted us and quickly took to our psychedelic buses. It was part of their religion to feed every traveler in a common kitchen called a langar. We were skinny and had been running out of supplies, eating mostly bulgur wheat, living off the little we had left. “Hunger is the best condiment,” goes the Indian saying, and we had that sauce in abundance. The food was wonderful: large fluffy naans and delicious, satisfying tandooris. We might have come for the temple, but we stayed for the food. They taught us whatever we could handle about their monotheistic religion, created in part to provide a safe zone between the bitter enemies of Muslims and Hindus. And then it was on to the capital of India, New Delhi.

As in Tehran, our first stop was the American Express office to pick up mail and money we hoped had been sent from back home. There were too many Hog Farmers to all go in at once so we took turns going in while the rest of us waited in the bus. While Wavy was in line, he bumped into Ram Dass, who had flown back to India to see his guru and was retrieving the first printed copies of his new book, Be Here Now. Without missing a beat, Ram Dass took one of the unopened copies of the book and inscribed it, “To Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm Family, the Hanumans of the 70s.”

I was sitting in the Sterling Hog, in front of the American Express office in New Delhi, waiting my turn as we passed the brand-new copy of Be Here Now around. This was one of the books credited with bringing the East to the West. It stopped violent political activism dead in its tracks for millions of young people all over the world who shifted their focus to the inner life.

If you’re a person of my generation, you know where you were when you heard that JFK had been killed. I was walking across the diagonal on the campus of the University of Michigan when I heard a crying girl scream out that JFK had been shot in Dallas. The world stood still and it seemed the tears would never end. Many of us also remember where we were when we first heard about Be Here Now. I certainly do.

The serendipity of bumping into Ram Dass in New Delhi was astonishing. Elaine and I had gone to hear him speak during my internship in 1970, when he delivered a series of three lectures at San Francisco’s Unitarian Church on three consecutive Thursdays in February of 1970. Also serendipitously, Thursdays were my only night off from the hospital. San Francisco had its share of false prophets, yet Elaine and I, skeptical, used up one precious night to go to the first lecture. We had no idea that Ram Dass had been a professor at Harvard who was fired for giving psychedelic drugs to undergraduates—one of the events that would lead to Ram Dass playing a major role in catalyzing a spiritual revolution.

“There is an old story from mystical India,” he had said to begin his talk back in San Francisco. “A young man was told by his village leader to take a chicken and kill it for supper. There were lots of children around, so the leader told the young man to kill it where no one could see. After a very long time, the young man came back and the chicken was still alive. The village leader was angry because the chicken was supposed to be for dinner. ‘Why didn’t you kill it?’ he asked. The young man answered: ‘You told me to kill it where no one could see. But everywhere I go, the chicken sees. And so does God.’”

“God is omnipresent,” Ram Dass said. “God is watching you all the time, not because you’re a big deal, not because you are something so important, but because God sees all. So live as though you know this.”

There was something about Ram Dass’s resonant voice, his spiritual demeanor, the holiness he had encountered in India that spoke to a place deep inside of both me and Elaine. My memory of this more than four decades later is that it was as if a light were coming out of his eyes or from his forehead. Whatever it was, that night, without drugs, sex, or earthquakes, it felt like the earth had moved.

“Be. Here. Now.” As he said this, stillness came over the room. “Quiet the breath, be still, be silent, be here. Take in all the love around you, feel the love.” A baby in the front row screamed. Ram Dass said, “And take that in too. Take in all of life, the pains of childbirth, the wailing of infants, the death throes, the happiness, the agony and the ecstasy. Be here now; be part of all the world.” As we left the church, there was a sign-up table for a new book that Ram Dass was going to write. For $3.33 when it was finished, he would mail a copy. It was going to be called Be Here Now.

Whatever was bringing Ram Dass that much peace, Elaine and I wanted more of it. Neither Elaine nor I were yet hippies or devotees—but both of us were very curious, very moved by Ram Dass during those talks in San Francisco.

And now we were to have dinner and some spiritual and hippie talks with both Ram Dass and Wavy together at an art gallery here in New Delhi. It felt perfect. This encounter between the Hog Farm and Ram Dass’s group was beshert, blessed, destined.

Later that night, these different branches of the extended counterculture family gathered at the Kumar Gallery. We all—Hog Farm and satsang alike—knew it was a special moment. The Hog Farm was in tie-dyed pants and Haight-Ashbury overalls; the ephemeral devotees were all dressed in white cotton ashram attire. The devotees folded their hands, bowed, smiled, and said, “Namaste.” They sat calmly with their eyes closed in the middle of the gallery. They smiled as if in on a shared secret. We in the Hog Farm were more frenetic. Ram Dass and Wavy each spoke to the crowd. We sang and danced and it was a magical meeting.

Bonnie Jean’s brother, Brook Beecher, who had joined us on this latest leg of the journey, was a large and physically powerful man who towered over everyone. Brook had been born with a hearing impairment, and while very intelligent, he also suffered from behavioral issues—he was sometimes difficult to control.

Out of nowhere, Brook grabbed Ram Dass by the neck, screaming, “You’re a fake, Ram Dass!” He picked up a rock to hit Ram Dass and kept saying, “You’re a fake!” Ram Dass was turning colors, and a little blood had appeared on his head. It took several Hog Farmers to pry Brook off of him, alternately carrying and dragging him out of the gallery as he yelled a half-mad, half-profound cri de coeur: “Holy men are full of holes! Holy men are full of holes!”

Ram Dass continued with equanimity; he seemed a sea of tranquility, just as he had been in San Francisco. No one was mad. Ram Dass spoke with compassion, forgiving the assault by Brook. Elaine was completely taken. I was too.

Without a word, these two distinct branches of a common psychedelic tree began to celebrate together. Almost in trance, we lifted our leaders, Ram Dass and Wavy, onto our shoulders and carried them in a circle singing, “Swing low, Sweet Chariot.” The resonance of our combined voices, the peace and forgiveness the devotees showed toward Brook, made me feel drawn to whatever had made them like that. I remembered hearing the same power behind Martin Luther King’s voice as well.

After a week in Delhi, the buses were cleaned, repaired, and ready to move again. But we were never going to get to what was now Bangladesh. We could get visas for Nepal, however, so we changed direction and planned to go to Agra, Benares, and then north over the mountains to, as my fellow Detroiter Bob Seger sings it, “K-k-k-k-k-k-Katmandu.”

With medical supplies and food still in the bellies of our buses, we camped inside the grounds of the Taj Mahal. There were no barricades then, no threat of terrorism. The crowds were sparse, and there was so much open space. Elaine and I loved walking alone in the light of the moon. Some hippies slept out in the open, others in tents or in the buses, and still others actually crept inside the crypt, which housed the tomb of Mumtaz Mahal, the favorite wife of the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. It is said that this is the greatest monument to love ever built, and of all the romantic times on our journey to the East, the most romantic of all were the nights making love in the shadow of the Taj Mahal.

A few days later, on the new moon of February 23, 1971, the Hindu festival of Shivaratri began. It was Shiva’s night, and our buses had reached Benares, the holiest city in India, where the dead are burned every day in the ghats or piers by the sacred Ganges River. Shiva, the god of destruction, is one part of the Hindu “trinity,” along with Brahma, the overseer of creation, and Vishnu, the god of preservation. Shiva is the heart and soul of Benares and on his new moon, it is said that hungry ghosts roam the streets of the city. By the banks of the Ganges, you can feel the ghosts in the marrow of your bones. A daily tide of beggars is drawn to Benares, perhaps to die, perhaps because wealthy Indians who are about to die are more generous with their daily handouts. On Shiva’s night in Benares, virtually every drink, every chapatti or rice dish or vegetable or cake or sweet is baked with a form of marijuana called bhang. Shiva loved to smoke his hashish-filled pipe, or chillum, just as do the wandering mendicants devoted to him. So on the new moon of Shiva, everything edible is cooked with added pot and bhang. Whether tourist or pilgrim, you could hardly consume anything that was not intoxicating. The celebration made Woodstock look dry in comparison.

About twenty of us were living on the Sterling Hog, the forty-foot-long bus with psychedelic paintings, rainbow-colored cushions, and a grand kitchen, at least for a hippie bus. Wavy, Bonnie Jean, Ruffin, Dolphin and Goose, Claudia, Butch, Fred the Fed, Red Dog, and Gypsy were among our sisters and brothers on the bus. When Wavy saw all the hungry beggars in Benares, he wanted to organize a massive dinner to feed everyone on the night of Shiva.

A dozen bus mates wandered through the bazaars and shopped for veggies to cook in this most vegetarian of cities. We settled on a site for the bus in Assi ghat, or “Pier 80,” as we might think of it, a residential area on the Ganges that had become a meeting point between colorful Indian sadhus and equally colorful European hippies and travelers. Wavy went through the crowds with a papier-mâché megaphone announcing “Free dinner” in English; a few bilingual sadhus translated. One of the sadhu-translators was a naga baba, a naked “snake man” covered only with ritual sandalwood paste and ash.

It was only March, but the Indian heat was excruciating. The Hog Farm cooks kept the stoves on the bus fired up all day. We had planned to serve two hundred, although we figured we could stretch the food to feed four hundred if we were careful. But we underestimated Wavy’s marketing prowess and the hunger of the beggars. Thousands came. Lepers, beggars, amputees, sadhus, elephant mahouts, naga babas, chillum babas smoking hashish, hippies, and travelers all waited in an ill-formed line that snaked around the bus in concentric circles. When it became clear that we didn’t have enough for everyone, the crowd turned unruly. They surrounded the bus and rocked it.

That was the night I learned that you can’t feed the hungry of the world with only good intentions, a lesson that has stayed with me forever.

To really make a difference, it takes much more than goodwill; it takes the dedication to learn something to offer, a skill or profession. It also takes perseverance. Charity that is not sustainable is over in the blink of an eye. The old adage attributed to Maimonides is right: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” To really change the world requires deep understanding and humility, doing the hard work of systemic thinking, a keen awareness of how a particular system operates, and—perhaps most important—an unwavering sense of what you, alone, are uniquely fit to do that will do the world a world of good.

As the crowd circled the bus, I was on top of it because I had some kind of awful dysentery. All day I had stayed out of the kitchen so I wouldn’t contaminate the food. As other members of the Hog Farm served the meal, I had to get away from the bus, and the only place left for me to go was up on its roof. I lugged with me an old thin mattress, a bottle of water, and the last of the toilet paper. Elaine was with the rest of our Hog Farm bus mates beneath me, doling out ever-smaller portions of food, hoping and praying for a modern version of the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

I felt like a piece of meat sizzling on a grill. When I tried to stand up, I almost fell off the roof into the crowds. I called for help, but no one could hear me over the din of the hungry crowd. I was wearing a kurta, a pajama-like top, and a white Indian dhoti, a cloth wrap popular in North India and long enough so that in case of death it could double as a shroud or burial cloth. I could see in the distance the funeral pyres near the Ganges, and as I ran out of toilet paper I had to use strips of cloth from my dhoti until only the barest of coverings remained. I had no water and no Lomotil, the pharmacological cork. That left only a few rupee notes, my passport, and my medical license. Since I needed my passport to get home, I considered my medical license and remembered that, back in San Francisco, a psychotic patient had once told me to shove my medical license up my ass. Before it was over, I would have no choice but to do just that.

I collapsed in a sick, dehydrated clump on top of the bus, wound myself into a fetal position, and drifted into some kind of altered consciousness. The crowds were rocking the bus; I think Butch started the engine and slowly moved us off like a mahout moves his elephant. I hung on to something and prayed to all the gods and goddesses of Hindu and Buddhist lore and to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to make the bus go and my diarrhea stop. Rocked by the movement, I fell asleep.

As painful as it was to run out of food, it was tremendously satisfying to feed the hungry. We kept doing it for the rest of our journey. We tried to find ways to distribute food and medicine in every poor pocket we encountered in India and Nepal. We visited Tibetan refugee camps along our pilgrimage to the Buddhist holy sites—gave out food and medicine, sometimes buying or trading watches for carpets. We took turns sitting under the Bodhi tree, the sacred tree under which Buddha twenty-five hundred years earlier had reached enlightenment. We drove north through the towns of ancient Hindu kings and relics of the third-century Licchavi kingdoms, through the border at Raxaul and into Nepal. On the ride into Kathmandu, half a dozen Hog Farmers were stoned and buck naked on the roof of the bus, hooting and cheering, waving Nepali and Tibetan flags and banners as the long pilgrimage along the Hippie Trail and the Silk Road from London to Kathmandu was about to be realized.

Hippies were in love with Kathmandu, and Kathmandu reciprocated with streets named “Freak Street” and places like “Tashi’s Trek Stop,” “Big Mac Buffalo Burgers,” and Krishna’s Hashish House. “We take higher” was the slogan on its ubiquitous hash-and-coffee house advertising posters. The English was flawed but the meaning unmistakable. And then there were the pie shops. It did not take our Nepali friends long to realize that nothing satisfied the cannabis sweet tooth like “Chai and Pie Shop” and shops along Pie Street in Durbar Square, where Hindu, Buddhist, and hippie culture seemed to merge so seamlessly.

We applied for trekking permits to Upper Mustang, the former mystical Kingdom of Lo, and were rejected. I cut my long hair, trimmed my beard, rented some mountain climbing clothes, and reapplied for a trekking permit for forty young people to climb from the flats through Pokhara and up to Jomson on the border of the legendary kingdom. While we were waiting for the permits to clear, we parked near the Tibetan Swayambhunath temple complex just outside Kathmandu where a famous golden stupa has the eyes of Buddha painted at its top.

The haircut and cleanup partly worked; we would be the first bus allowed to drive to Pokhara on the new Chinese-built road. We camped by the Fishtail Lodge on the shore of the lake in Pokhara, gathered the family and our gear, and then everyone scattered into the hills. The last party to leave for the mountains consisted of Wavy and Bonnie Jean, Elaine and me, another Hog Farmer named Ruffin Cooper from the Medicine Ball Caravan who had the camera to document our journey,^* and two Tibetan porters—one to carry Wavy’s toys, and one to carry my medical supplies.

We began the trek out of Pokhara on a gorgeous day, the white peaks of Machapuchare—a mountain named for its fishtail twin peaks—shining brightly over green hills and a riot of colorful wildflowers. Just for us, it seemed, a cartoonishly vibrant double rainbow appeared, inviting us to begin the ascent to the sacred mountains.

Hardly a day into our trek, just before we reached the first town, we met two Tibetans who had gotten into a drunken fight at a bar. Each man had wielded a broken beer bottle and cut off most of the other’s cheek. They were bleeding profusely. I set up my impromptu operating room by the side of the road and stitched their faces back together, while Wavy sat on a stone outside, blowing soap bubbles to keep onlookers from crashing my sterile operating area. One of our porters—either Dawa Tundrup or Sanya Mandu—acted as translator while I sewed the Tibetans’ wounds. I had needles and surgical thread but no way to anesthetize them. They were so stoic throughout the procedure; when I finished, both men thanked me profusely and then bowed to each other as they said, Om mani padme hum, which translates roughly as “Hail to the jewel of the lotus, symbol of awakened humanity.” When I finished doing the surgery, I found a line of new patients waiting for me to treat them, nearly a quarter-mile long, snaking down to the river and across a bridge. I did the best I could with the tools I had while Wavy blew more bubbles and exchanged stories and jokes. For a moment, we had quite a loving open-air hospital in those sweet hills.

Every patient who received a pill or suture or cream thanked me by saying “Hare Om” or “Om mani padme hum.” Either way, the “Om” made me feel at home. Hippie culture back in San Francisco, and even on the Hog Farm buses, was powered by chanting Om. Indeed, the values we found trekking in the hills of Nepal remain with me today. I still remember the names of the little villages—Pokhara, Goropani, Tatopani, Marpha, Jomson—because they felt so comfortable then, and yet so exotic. Every step, every sacred ritual—the ganja, the prayers, the way that people looked each other in the eyes with respect, the idea of community—they all mirrored much of what the counterculture aspired toward, the raison d’être for the hippie movement.

We must have looked like Martians as we walked past their homes, in our patchwork, tie-dye, fancy backpacks, watches, and radios; Wavy in his all-orange jumpsuit, pointed jester’s hat, and rainbow-colored teeth. And we must have looked like klutzes as we crawled on our bellies over the bridges they danced across. We paid them less than a dollar a day for room and board, yet they welcomed us as intimate members of the family. We played with their children, held their most sacred objects. Wavy and Bonnie Jean, Elaine and I, made a promise to each other, that if ever we became richer than the poor hippies we were then, we could give back something to those wonderful people in Nepal. That promise became realized less than ten years later when the four of us and our friends from the smallpox program started an organization with the Hindi and Nepali name for service, Seva, and the eyes of Buddha from the Kathmandu stupa as our logo. The mission has been to give back sight to blind people in Nepal. And while the Seva Foundation started in Nepal, it has grown to more than two dozen countries, and our programs and projects and friends have given back sight to more than four million blind people. There are many wonderful and varied reasons Seva has succeeded, but it began when poor Nepali families shared everything with four Martians who happened to walk by.